Logan co-writer says Deadpool & Wolverine corpse desecration is a compliment, actually

[Note: This article contains spoilers for the opening few minutes of Deadpool & Wolverine.]

It’s clear, from its opening seconds, that the five credited screenwriters on this summer’s big superhero blockbuster Deadpool & Wolverine knew they had a Logan problem. The literal title of their movie (to say nothing of the aggressive ad campaign) made it clear that X-Men star Hugh Jackman would, by the very nature of the thing, have to undo at least part of the impact of the end of James Mangold’s Oscar-nominated coda to Jackman’s run as Canada’s most beloved stab-and-grunt-er; otherwise, everything from the ampersand on was going to be kind of a problem. If you’ve seen the movie, you know Ryan Reynolds and his crew of co-writers tackled the problem in typically over-the-top Deadpool fashion, by having the Merc With The Mouth first dig up Logan’s corpse out from under that portentous X cross, then use it to beat a bunch of mooks to death while dancing around to NSYNC.

Now, one of the screenwriters of Logan, Michael Green, has weighed in on the new film—and he says he views that opening as a “huge compliment.” Green, who was promoting his show Blue Eye Samurai, was talking about Deadpool & Wolverine with IGN this week, saying he’d been “warned” about the movie’s beginning. Admitting with a laugh that “I didn’t know they were gonna go that far,” Green makes it clear he thought the film was enormous fun. He also suggests (not inaccurately, to our minds) that the aggressive energy with which the movie addresses Logan is its own kind of compliment, a way of saying, basically that the movie he co-wrote was too good to ignore. (He also joked that he was just happy the movie didn’t have any Green Lantern jokes, since he was one of the co-writers of that particular Ryan Reynolds superhero debacle.)

Meanwhile, Green’s co-writer on, and the director of, Logan, James Mangold, has not addressed the movie as of yet; he’d previously expressed disappointment at seeing Jackman return to the character, while acknowledging that “As much liquid as they can squeeze out of that rag, they’re going to try to. I don’t measure my success on a movie like Logan with whether we ended the conversation. I ended my conversation.”